Home Appointments Prime Minister
Prime Minister
Thailand Government
| Appointee | Yingluck Shinawatra |
|---|---|
| Role | Prime Minister |
| Organisation | Thailand Government |
| Domain | Politics |
| Start | 5 August 2011 |
| End | 7 May 2014 |
| Notes | First woman PM of Thailand; deposed by constitutional court ruling |
Institutional context
The Prime Minister of Thailand is the head of government in a constitutional monarchy. The office dates to the 1932 constitutional revolution. From 1932 through August 2011 every holder was male.
Career path
Yingluck Shinawatra (born 1967) is the youngest sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, who served as Prime Minister of Thailand from 2001 to 2006 before being deposed by a military coup. She earned an MA in public administration from Kentucky State University and worked as a senior executive in the Shinawatra family's telecommunications and real-estate businesses.
Appointment
The Pheu Thai Party led by Yingluck won the July 2011 general election decisively and she was sworn in as Prime Minister on 5 August 2011. She is the first woman Prime Minister of Thailand.
Tenure
Two years and nine months. Her tenure was marked by extensive flooding in 2011, a contested rice-pledging subsidy programme, and prolonged anti-government protests from late 2013. The Constitutional Court of Thailand removed her from office on 7 May 2014 on the grounds of abuse of authority; the military deposed her caretaker successor in a coup on 22 May 2014.
Cluster context
Yingluck's 2011 appointment is the second East Asian / Southeast Asian first-woman head of government in the dataset (after Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka 1960). Her removal by court ruling, followed by Park Geun-hye's 2017 impeachment in South Korea and Rousseff's 2016 impeachment in Brazil, constitutes a pattern of woman heads of government removed through constitutional or quasi-constitutional procedures in the early 2010s.